Ulzurrun de Asanza i Sàez

Month: July 2013

PostgreSQL in OS X with Postgres.app

Postgres.app logo

Postgres.app menu

Mac OS X, starting with Lion, has PostgreSQL built-in. For some projects being able to use this build-in PostgreSQL server is a very handy feature. We could start it through Terminal but there are easier approaches, for sure.

In fact, the easiest approach I’ve found so far is Postgres.app. It’s just a menubar-application that starts PostgreSQL and shows you the port listened by PostgreSQL, a shortcut to psql command line, documentation and the ability to automatically start the server on system start up.

A direct access to PostgreSQL configuration would be nice, but even without it Postgres.app is very useful. And it’s free!


Starting over

It’s been a long time… I haven’t published anything since last year, and I just published last year once! That was not exactly what I wanted but my time was scarce. Moreover I wanted to write interesting, unique posts so it wasn’t that easy to find something relevant enough to write about.

As you’ll have realized, I’m writing in English. Yes, you’re right, English is not my first language (nor my second!) so my grammar and vocabulary will suck for sure. Why English? I’ve studied last two years in English. I’ve found the experience pretty interesting and I really liked it, but English group does not cover all the degree and probably next year there won’t be an “English group” to apply for, so in order to not lose practice I’ve decided to post in English starting today.

You’ll be wondering what have I been doing last two years. Well, it is really not so difficult to summarize.

University and Java

In 2011 I started a degree in Computer Science and it was (is) great, but also requires plenty of time, part of it invested in Java programming. During these two years I’ve done some projects in Java but all of them pretty small: command-line games, academic examples, small boilerplate code and so on. None of them deserve a description of more than a line or two. I’ve worked in other academic non-Java projects, of course (small programs in assembly, C and Haskell), but they’re also really small projects.

My personal projects have been paused during these years. I really want to update WP Carousel, but I want to rewrite it from scratch and it will require more time that I can offer right now. The same is applicable to Music Maniac. Both projects are not completely abandoned but frozen until I’ve time to update them.

New projects

I haven’t worked on any existing project since 2011 but I’ve worked on new projects. Specifically I’ve founded a startup named Front.me with my friend Javier Rodríguez Vidal. This project deserves a better introduction but I’ll be short this time: we are working on the first really-social news platform.

The middle-term future

So if I am working on a big project that requires all my time, what am I going to write about? My idea is writing small posts about tips I found out during Front.me development, frameworks and libraries I come across, maybe reviews of gadgets I buy…. Not exactly “tutorials” but ideas you can apply for different purposes and sometimes I’ll release small pieces of code I found useful.